Reading Quotes

The goal of reading and writing is to live better.

Dominique Loreau

Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

Annie Proulx

Reading is like fresh food for the mind. The consumption fills you with wisdom.

James Clear

There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people’s books and write your own.

Albert Einstein

Read deeply. Stay open. Continue to wonder.

Austin Kleon

Be a life-long student, read as many books as possible.

Nelson Mandela

Reading is sowing. Rereading is the harvest.

Johnny Uzan

The smarter you get, the slower you read.

Naval Ravikant

We read books to find out who we are.

Ursula K Le Guin

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

Groucho Marx

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

Oscar Wilde

Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.

Thomas à Kempis

It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.

Yoshida Kenko

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

Thoreau

View reading as an investment.

Naval Ravikant

Think before you speak. Read before you think.

Fran Lebowitz

Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author’s words reverberating in your head.

Paul Auster

I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

C S Lewis

We read to know we are not alone.

C S Lewis

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

Robertson Davies

At every moment, you should be reading the best book you know of in the world for you.

Patrick Collison

What a great treasure can be hidden in a small, selected library! A company of the wisest and the most deserving people from all the civilized countries of the world, for thousands of years, can make the results of their studies and their wisdom available to us. The thought which they might not even reveal to their best friends is written here in clear words for us, people from another century. Yes, we should be grateful for the best books, for the best spiritual achievements in our lives.

Emerson

We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.

Alain de Botton

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

Nelson Mandela

My alma mater was books, a good library… I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.

Malcolm X

When I wasn’t working, the weekends would usually find me alone in an empty apartment, making do with the company of books.

Barack Obama

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

Albert Einstein

Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.

Malcolm X

Reading brings us unknown friends.

Balzac

I am but a small child wandering upon the vast shores of knowledge, every now and then finding a small bright pebble to be content with.

Plato

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

Steven Wright

You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.

Seneca

Read books that are relevant to what you want to achieve and reading will never seem boring.

James Clear

A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.

Walter Mosley

A word after a word after a word is power.

Margaret Atwood

A word after a word after a word is power.

Margaret Atwood

Reading is departure and arrival.

Terri Guillemets

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

Somerset Maugham

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

John Locke

Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.

Louis L’Amour

Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary.

Jim Rohn

Reading brings us unknown friends.

Balzac

The quality of your thoughts is determined by the quality of your reading.

James Clear

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Jean Rhys

Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.

Harry Truman

A fondness for reading, which, properly directed, must be an education in itself.

Jane Austen

Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood.

John Green

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

Somerset Maugham

Reading is the gateway skill that makes all other learning possible, from complex word problems and the meaning of our history to scientific discovery and technological proficiency.

Barack Obama

When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.

Montaigne

One of the most incredible things about reading: A good book can give you a new way to interpret your past experiences. Whenever you learn a new mental model or idea, it’s like the “software” in your brain gets updated. Suddenly, you can learn new lessons from old moments.

James Clear

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

Charles Baudelaire

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question: What do I plan to do with this information?

Ryan Holiday

Speed reading is a compelling way to consume more content while gaining less insight. The purpose of reading is to learn and reflect. It’s about quality, not quantity. A great book should be savored like a gourmet meal, not inhaled like fast food.

Adam Grant

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Margaret Fuller

Leaders are always readers.

Kevin Trudeau

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.

Orhan Pamuk

Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.

Holbrook Jackson

Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.

Ezra Pound

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Victor Hugo

Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

A S Byatt

Reading is my favorite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read.

Anne Brontë

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

Oscar Wilde

Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.

Malorie Blackman

Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

Joseph Addison

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.

Jane Austen

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

Gustave Flaubert

So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.

Roald Dahl

Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.

Cervantes

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.

J D Salinger

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.

Mary Schmich

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.

Mary Wortley Montagu

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

Rene Descartes

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

Robert Louis Stevenson

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

Abraham Lincoln

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Reading—the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

William Styron

A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.

Lemony Snicket

Reading is an act of civilization; it’s one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities.

Ben Okri

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.

Edith Sitwell

Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift.

Kate DiCamillo

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

C S Lewis

We live for books.

Umberto Eco

I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.

Roald Dahl

Reading—even browsing—an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search.

James Gleick

We read to know we’re not alone.

William Nicholson

Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.

Khaled Hosseini

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.

Virginia Woolf

Reading means borrowing.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.

Alan Bennett

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

James Baldwin

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

Richard Steele

I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.

Charles de Montesquieu

People will always eat, and they’ll always read.

Bonnie Slotnick

In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.

Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.

Thomas A Kempis

A book is a record of our communal experience.

Elaine Katzenberger